Indian village bans women from using mobile phones

Indian village has banned women from using mobile phones in public in an attempt to restrict their contacts with men and plans hefty fines for violators, police said Wednesday.

Village elders ruled that women found using a mobile phone outside their homes would be fined 21,000 rupees ($325) -- a sum it would take most rural Indians several months to earn.

The ruling was issued on Tuesday in Madora, a mainly Muslim village in the conservative northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

"We have received reports about the Khap ordering the ban on women using mobile phones," local police chief Arun Kumar Singh told AFP, referring to the informal village councils known as khap panchayats in India.

"Such orders are against the constitution and we will take action."

The council believes that mobile phones are helping unmarried women to elope and that a ban will limit their interaction with men.

The council also imposed fines on people caught slaughtering cows -- illegal in most Indian states -- or smuggling liquor.

"We do support their measures against illegal activities but won't allow them to curb the freedom of women," Singh said.

Khap panchayats are mostly run by male village elders. Although illegal, they have considerable influence in rural north India.

They are known for issuing diktats aimed at upholding the socially conservative traditions that have long held sway and resisting modernisation -- such as banning women from wearing jeans.

But they have also been blamed for ordering serious crimes, including the so-called "honour killing" of couples who marry outside caste or religion.

Critics accuse them of acting like kangaroo courts and handing down public beatings and other punishments for perceived crimes.

Source: Prothom Alo

Gazipur father-daughter suicide case prime accused held

Police arrested the main accused of the father-daughter suicide case from Karnapur village in Sreepur upazila of Gazipur on Tuesday night.
Sreepur police station Officer-in-charge Asaduzzaman said policemen arrested Sahid, 40, a neighbour of the victims and son of Nazir Uddin, at night, reports news agency UNB.
Hazrat, 45, along with his daughter Ayesha Akhter, 8, committed ‘suicide’ jumping before a moving train near Sreepur Railway Station on Saturday morning after having failed to get justice as a young man attempted to violate his minor daughter and grab his land.
After the ‘suicide’, Hazrat’s wife Halima Begum filed a case with the local police station making Sahid the main accused.
Halima claimed that some of their neighbours, including Shahid, had long been trying to grab the land of Hazrat, and their only child Ayesha was sexually abused by a neighbour barely three months back.
Hazrat informed Goshinga Union Parishad member Abul Hossain about it and he got depressed as the UP member did not take any step, Halima alleged.

Source: Prothom Alo

Myanmar soldiers caught smuggling yaba near Bangladesh border

Two military officers and two other men have been arrested in Myanmar’s restive Rakhine state with hundreds of thousands of meth tablets in their car, police sources said Tuesday.

Experts say growing demand for methamphetamines in neighbouring Bangladesh is driving a surge in drug trafficking through the volatile border region, where the army has carried out a bloody military crackdown on Rohingya Muslims.

A local border guard police officer said the four men were arrested at a checkpoint while travelling from Rakhine’s Butheedaung township to Maungdaw.

“A major and his fellow soldier and two Rakhines were arrested with stimulant tablets by a combined team on Monday morning,” he told AFP on the condition of anonymity.

“The military officer and soldier will be dealt with according to the military’s rules and regulations, so we have already transferred the two to the local military command.”

He estimated the pills had a street value of around 880 million kyat ($650,000).

Police major Kyaw Mya Win in Maungdaw town confirmed the arrests, but declined to say who was involved.

“Border guard police seized 440,000 stimulant tablets Monday morning from a vehicle that was travelling from Butheedaung to Maungdaw,” he told AFP.

Myanmar is one of the largest drug-producers in the world, churning out vast quantities of opium, cannabis and millions of caffeine-laced methamphetamine pills known as “yaba”.

Last year police confiscated a record 98 million of the tablets, nearly double the 50 million seized in 2015. Drug prosecutions also jumped by around 50 percent to 13,500.

Most pills are made by armed ethnic groups along Myanmar’s eastern border with China and then exported across Southeast Asia, with clients running the gamut from truck drivers to wealthy party-goers.

Military figures have also been accused of profiting from the drug trade but prosecutions of army officers are rare in the former junta-run country.

Meth tablets headed for Bangladesh are often smuggled across the Naf river that divides the two countries by Rohingya Muslims, a poor and persecuted minority.

More than 70,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh in recent months to escape a bloody army crackdown in northern Rakhine.

State media has been reporting almost daily seizures of the pills in the area over recent months. In February a Buddhist monk was caught hiding more than four million tablets in his monastery.

Source: Prothom Alo

Over 200 Bangladeshis stranded in India

200 Bangladeshis, who were trafficked to and rescued in India four years ago, are anxiously waiting for return to their homes.

In a report, India’s First Post also said on Wednesday that the Bangladeshis are now sheltered across the Indian state adjacent to Bangladesh border.

“At present, about 220 rescued trafficked victims are lodged at various homes and are waiting to return to Bangladesh. However, some factors, legal and otherwise, have come in the way of their return,” principal secretary of the Indian state’s women and child welfare development Roshni Sen was quoted to have said.

Quoting an Indian government official, the report said in most cases the girls either cannot provide addresses in Bangladesh to where they can be sent back or their parents cannot be located.

“In most cases the addresses or the parents of the victims could not be traced, though we completed the standard operating procedure. Secondly, there were instances in which the victims were unable to identify their homes,” Sen was also quoted to have said.

Source: Prothom Alo

Khaleda’s Twitter account gets verified

The authorities of social network Twitter have verified the account of Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chairperson and former prime minister Khaleda Zia.
The verified Twitter account is @BegumZiaBd.


BNP chairperson’s media wing member Sayrul Kabir Khan told the Prothom Alo that the account was verified at 7:00pm (BST) on Tuesday.
Khaleda officially launched her Twitter account on 1 September last year.


Source: Prothom Alo

Islamophobic' incidents rise by 10 times in Trump era

Islamophobic incidents involving US customs and border protection officials have risen by about 1,000 per cent since president Donald Trump took office in January, a Muslim activist group said.

According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations on Tuesday, preliminary data collected from its branches across the US found that instances in which officials were accused of profiling Muslims accounted 23 per cent in 2017.

Of the 193 customs and border protection (CBP) cases in 2017, at least 181 were reported after the 27 January Muslim travel ban. In the first three months of 2016, the group reported 17 cases, The Independent said.

"These are incidents which are reported to us and which we examine," Corey Saylor, director of CAIR's group that monitors Islamophobia, told The Independent.

"We look at these very carefully. Around 50 per cent, we reject."

Saylor said allegations of Islamophobia being levelled at border officials was nothing new.

He believed that Trump's election and the executive order was behind the spike in incidents. "I have no doubt in my mind that these things are connected."

In the aftermath of the travel ban, which have been halted by the courts, there were widespread reports of chaos at US airports, and people being turned away as they sought to board flights to the US at foreign airports.

Trump vowed during his election campaign that he would make it more difficult for people from certain countries to reach the US as party of tighter security, despite immigrants from countries such as Syria and Somalia already having to endure screening that can take several years.

Saylor said he appreciated the difficult job being faced by border officials, but asked that they did it without breaching the US constitution.

He cited testimony of a Customs and Border Protection official from a 2013 lawsuit, who said: "Look to the Muslim woman as an indicating factor. By the way she wears her hijab. If the hijab is a solid colour it indicates religiosity. If it's a patterned scarf, with colours, it's more likely that she is less religious.

Khaleda not listening to Zia’s words: Zafrullah Chy

Gonoshasthaya Kendra founder and trustee Zafrullah Chowdhury on Wednesday said Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) chairperson Khaleda Zia is 'not listening to the words' of its founder Ziaur Rahman.

Widely known as a pro-BNP intellectual, Zafrullah made this point at a programme organised to launch a book and website titled ‘Ziaur Rahman Bir Uttam’ at the Dhaka Reporters’ Unity in the capital.

BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir was present at the function when Zafrullah was addressing it.

“Ziaur Rahman set up the first women development commission in the country and set up a separate ministry for women. He [Zia] spoke of incorporating more women into the party fold.

“But, Khaleda Zia has kept only one woman member in the the party’s National Standing Committee, suggesting that she is not listening to Ziaur Rahman,” said Zafrullah Chowdhury.

Khaleda Zia, a former prime minister, herself is the only female member of the BNP's standing committee.